Skylanders Party {Jack's 7th Birthday}

Excuse my six month hiatus. Life has taken over and blogging has taken a back seat. Perhaps one day soon, I'll find time again to get back at it.

In the meantime, I did happen to capture a very important 7th birthday and I feel it necessary to document it on the family blog since every child's birthday is a special milestone {note that the last post was from Paige's 3rd birthday...hard to believe she's already 3 1/2}.

As the year's tick by, I find it harder and harder to enforce my birthday party ideas. Jack has his own plans and ideas for what he wants for his birthday. Luckily, there are many creative bloggers out there that provide endless and over-the-top ideas for party planning, even for those themes that seem less than desirable. Case in point, Jack's request for a Skylanders birthday party for year 7.

For those of you that don't know what Skylanders are, count your blessings. And if you want to be schooled on them, just ask Jack. But the jist is that it's a Wii game. You hook up the portal to the Wii.  Collect all gazillion characters, which when placed on the portal brings the characters to "life" and they are animated on the screen as your playing figure until you decide to switch out your character and you just remove one guy from the portal, but someone else on and you can be a totally different character without having to restart the whole game. Boys between ages 5 or 6 and maybe up to 8 or 9 are obsessed with them. If you have a boy nearing this age range, watch out. Skylanders are probably in your future - even if you don't own a Wii.

As soon as Jack mentioned it, I took to the internet to find a "cute" Skylanders party. Thinking that would be an impossible feat, I was pleasantly surprised to find this blogger. She not only did it cute, but she also had an Etsy shop where she sold a lot of the supplies for the party. I ordered her {Lulu Cole} personalized invitations, the gumball tube favor supplies and the cake topper. I ordered the fondant cupcake toppers from LesPop Sweets on Etsy. Here is my Pinterest board that helped serve as an inspiration for the other party details. We did it as a pool party at our neighborhood pool and community center. Jack was in H-E-A-V-E-N!

The sweets table. The kids got baggies and filled them with Skylander-inspired sweet treats.

Fondant cupcake toppers from LesPop Sweets
represent each element and sheep, which are apparently part of the game???

Jack's "portal" cake was made by moi. Just used fondant for the sides and used a stone mold from Michael's to create the impressions in the fondant. There's a picture of an actual Wii portal below, that remember, is used to bring the characters to life on the game. "Thumpback" is one of Jack's favorite characters and we thought it was appropriate to use one of the "water element" characters since it was a pool party.

We decided to find a treat to represent each element. Each character falls into an element category -  water, fire, life, earth, wind, magic, undead or tech and picked a character to represent from that category. The characters even have phrases that they say throughout the game, which we incorporated onto the food tags. Jack has them all memorized and loves to play this game where he says the phrase and you guess which character says it. Only those who really know the game would get this, but it is really fun to play along with him just because he has forced us to learn them. Paige even likes to join in on his game.

"Tree Rex"Chocolate Bark Cookies
Life Element

"Crushers" Rock Chocolate
Earth Element

"Eruptor's" Lava Fire Balls
Fire Element
The kids weren't too keen on spicy, cinnamon candy, but hey, what else are you going to use to represent fire? You can see on the tag that Eruptor's saying is "Born to Burn". That's the only one I can recall at the moment, but you get the point. 

"Double Trouble's" Magic Pop Rocks
Magic Element
Some kids had never experienced pop rocks. Can you imagine?

"Chop Chop's Undead Bones
Undead Element
Pretzels and mini marshmallows dipped in white chocolate.
These would be fun to make for Halloween, too!

"Jet-Vac's" Jet Puffed Marshmallows
Wind Element

"Thumpback's" Salt Water Taffy
Water Element

"Trigger Happy's" Cold Chocolate Coins
Tech Element
I know Trigger Happy says, "No gold, no glory!"

There's the real game portal I was telling you about.

We served simple foods like spinach dip, pineapple and orage slices with cherries and a veggie tray.

And easy delivery pizza to power up with.

The favors were tubes of gumballs each representing the various elements.

In case you are thinking this...no, we did not purchase all of these Skylanders to decorate the party with. We actually own about a trillion of them already. Each retails for about $10-15 dollars each, so they make good little gifts to add on at Christmas or in an Easter Basket or if someone is looking for a small gift idea. So over time we have amassed quite a collection of them.

The rest are just photos of the rollicking-good fun that we had at the pool and at the party.

The financier and the event planner.

Our two youngest party guests seemed pretty intrigued.

This sweet little boy's happy, smiling face makes the Skylander theme all worth it! We had lots of friends. Lots of family. And a great time was had by all.

Happy 7th birthday, Jack!!